Richard Wright

Honestly.  This is your very last chance to take a Short Trip.  On the first of January 2010, Big Finish lose the right not only to publish, but also to sell, their Short Trips range of hardback Doctor Who anthologies, featuring various original adventures of the first eight incarnations of Doctor Who.  Basically, the BBC have not renewed Big Finish’s licence to produce these collections based on the suddenly-successful-all-over-again science fiction character (they issued the licence back when there was no new Doctor Who being produced for television, before the current revival).  It’s pure speculation on my part, but I guess this is because they plan to do some of their own story collections through their own publishing wing.

This is important to you, potentially, because it’s the last chance you have of being able to read my short story ‘Lonely’, featuring the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann, on the tellybox and radiophone), an Internet chatroom, and the lost and lonely souls who wander in there.  The story was first published in the anthology Short Trips – Transmissions, and this year was reprinted in Big Finish’s final Short Trips book, which gathered the best tales in the range into one massive volume called Short Trips – Re:Collections.

Short Trips – Transmissions is probably the better of the two books.  Twenty-fifth in the Short Trips range, it’s among the best the series produced, thanks to the careful thought editor Richard Salter puts into the theme (communication) and the resultant selection of stories.  It hangs together really well, basically, and contains several stories which stand out as excellent bits of storytelling, in any genre.  At the moment, you can get it on sale direct from Big Finish, for a fiver.

Short Trips – Re:Collections collects the ‘best’ story from each of the previous twenty-eight volumes in the range (as chosen by the editor of each book) in a frankly massive volume.  The stories are individually excellent, as you’d hope, but the book perhaps hangs a little awkwardly together.  You do get a lot for your money though, and will enjoy what you find in there.  At the moment, this one is on sale too, for a tenner.

Last chance.  These books are about to become much harder to find, on the secondary market, where they’ll probably sell for increasingly silly amounts of money when you can find them at all.  Buy them now instead, while they’re cheap.  Get them for your Doctor Who loving loved one.  As I’ve said before, I won’t be able to resell my story ‘Lonely’, because the BBC owns the character, not me.

Last chance.  Buy it now.  Don’t decide you want it in eighteen months time, when you can’t find a copy for love nor sensible amounts of money, and then say I didn’t warn you.  That’s what I’m doing here, you see?

You know what you must do.

It’s May. That means you can grab the hardback anthology Short Trips: Transmissions for half the cover price, £7.50, direct from the publisher. It contains my story ‘Lonely’, and is just about to go out of print – the sale runs for exactly as long as stocks last. Don’t hang about, if you want one.

It won’t be the very last appearance of the story, as it’s been selected to appear in the ‘Best Of’ final volume of the Short Trips range later this month, cover price £20. After that though… well, because I don’t own the rights to Doctor Who, I won’t be able to publish the story anywhere else. Read it in one of these books, or be left forever wondering what I did to the Eighth Doctor in a chatroom…

Go on. You know you want to.

You have no idea what it does to a man’s psyche, seeing his obituary posted all over the web.  I had to check my own pulse (and panicked when I couldn’t find it).

Anyway, a reader (hi Don!) inadvertently reminds me that I have been neglectful of the old website recently, and though I didn’t think so much time has passed, it was indeed more than a month ago that I last posted anything here.  Sorry about that.  I’ll do better from now on.

Today though, I shall make mention of a couple of reviews for Short Trips: Transmissions. Both are rather good, and say nice things about ‘Lonely’ (an indeed, the other stories – the book is going down very well with those who give it a try). The first is online, so you can read it for free over at Sci-Fi Online, and see whether or not ‘Lonely’ is both creepy, and gripping (erm… it is…).

The second is in this month’s Doctor Who Magazine, issue 400 no less, and is similarly favourable, if a little harder to find soundbites in.  It does point out that anthologies are by their nature hit and miss, and that this one hits more often than it misses, so that’s okay.  As an aside to that, you have no idea how weird it is being reviewed in a magazine you used to read when you were a kid.  Very strange, in a good way.

Anyway, go and buy a copy.  Don did, from Amazon, and it turned up the next day. He enjoyed it, quite a lot, and I think you will too.

Myself and several other writers from the Doctor Who book Short Trips – Transmissions are posting a behind the scenes look at how our stories were born over on the Outpost Gallifrey forums. Rather than make you go through the rigmarole of signing up just for my entry, I reproduce it here (though if you wish to follow the other writers as they post their thoughts, sign up you must…). If you’re the sort of reader who loathes knowing how a story is born, and feel it strips away the magic of the reading, now would be an excellent time to look away.

‘Lonely’ suffered it’s pre-birth gestation during the mid-nineties in, appropriately enough, an internet chatroom. I was at that time new to the Interweb, and when I finally acquired a modem-equipped PC, I scoured the primitive search engines for my own literary addiction, horror. One of the first things I found was a chatroom called Horrornet, and after some procrastination, I tentatively logged in.

The group of writers and readers who greeted me were a bit of a revelation. I had never met another horror writer, actual or aspiring, so the instant community of people interested in exactly that was… well, you can imagine. Many of you will get what I mean immediately. Cast your mind back to the first time you stumbled across Outpost Gallifrey, or somewhere similar, full of like minds. Yes, it felt exactly like that. A bit scary, a bit exciting, and in a strange way, a vast relief. I wasn’t alone, and that’s a splendid thing to know.

As well as the people I met, many of whom I still correspond with today, the things that most intrigued me were the voices. Those tiny lines of text appearing on the screen before me – all formed of the same characters, in the same silent, toneless medium – quickly assumed personalities. I was very quickly able to distinguish Keene from Cooper, Schwartz from Garton, Murphy from Rainy, without having to constantly refer to the name or ‘handle’ next to their words. I recognised the voice without seeing the face, if you like. As a (then) actor, used to reading scripts, I understood personality through language alone – how else have Hamlet, Dysart, and many others remained essentially the same characters through the years, to be expressed so similarly by the actors who have inhabited them? Yet the playwrights who scripted thosevoices edited them over and over, honing every word and phrase to precision. These internet voices were raw, but every bit as unique and expressive.

It wasn’t long afterwards that the idea of writing a short story set in an internet chatroom popped into my head. I like playing with form, and this was, at the time, a new one to explore. Yet there was a problem. I couldn’t figure out how such a story would develop past the point of peril. I could place the characters – ordinary, unsuspecting folk – in the room, expose them to jeopardy, and then I hit a wall. I couldn’t resolve the plot. The nature of the jeopardy was so unique that it wasn’t credible for the characters to extricate themselves from their predicament. I worked it through in my head over and again, with no progress made.

Over a decade passed.

And Richard Salter invited me to pitch to Transmissions. At first I was excited, but stumped. The theme of the anthology offered me a chance to do my favourite thing, toying with form in ways that would hopefully please the reader, but I dried up on ideas. It might have been the self-imposed pressure, because the chance to write a new story for the Doctor really did (and does) excite me. At one early stage I didn’t think I was going to come up with anything suitable.

And then the chatroom idea dragged itself sluggishly from its little cell at the back of my mind. As soon as I introduced the Doctor, injecting him into the tale just as things hit crisis point, the story just worked, as though it had always been a Doctor Who story, and had just been waiting for me to realise it. It wasn’t perfect, not at first, partly due to my choice of Doctor (I went for McCoy at his most world-weary, and he just didn’t fit properly). When Mr Salter asked if I would consider rewriting for McGann…

Well, you know the rest, or if you don’t, you’re a purchase away from finding out. I’d love to hear how you think it worked out, so if you get a chance after reading it, let me know.

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With all the recent Doctor Whoity round these parts, it nearly slipped my notice that Beneath the Surface, the paperback from Shroud Publishing featuring my story ‘Secrets, Never Told’, has finally emerged on Amazon.co.uk. British readers rejoice! And while you’re rejoicing, put it in your basket next to a copy of Short Trips – Transmissions!

Good times!